🍞 Cakes, Biscuits and Pastry

Cake is a foam held in place by starch and egg protein. Everything in cake making is about getting air in, keeping it in until the structure sets, and not letting gluten develop enough to make the crumb tough. That is why cake flour is weak, at 7 to 9 percent protein, while bread flour is 12 to 14. If your only flour is a general-purpose grade at 8 to 11 percent, you are at the top of the cake range and must be gentler in mixing than a recipe written for true cake flour assumes.

The classical starting point is the balanced ratio, in baker's percentage on flour: flour 100, sugar 100, fat 100, eggs 100, liquid 70 to 100. That is the pound-cake relationship, and it is a teaching convention rather than a validated specification, so treat it as a place to adjust from. Milk powder in cakes can go up to 15 percent of flour, against 2 to 8 percent in yeast doughs, and it darkens the crust through lactose caramelisation while improving keeping quality.

Scale it like any other formula. Suppose you want 6 kg of cake batter. The percentages total 100 plus 100 plus 100 plus 100 plus 85 for liquid, which is 485. Flour equals (6,000 divided by 485) times 100 = 1,237 g. Sugar, fat and eggs are each also 1,237 g, and liquid is 1,237 times 0.85 = 1,051 g. Check: 1,237 times 4 plus 1,051 = 6,000 g. If eggs in your market are about 55 g each, 1,237 g is roughly 22 to 23 eggs, which is a real purchasing decision and should appear on your costing sheet as such.

Now the methods. Creaming beats fat and sugar together first, using the sugar crystals to cut air pockets into the fat, then adds egg gradually, then folds in flour. It depends entirely on the creaming ability of your fat, which is one of the six published functions of fat in baking alongside tenderising, plastic range, lubrication, moistening and nutrition. The better the creaming ability, the lighter the cake. In a hot climate this is where cakes fail: fat that has gone past its plastic range will not hold air, and butter at 32 degrees Celsius in the room is oil, not fat. Work early, work cool, and if the fat starts to look greasy rather than fluffy, stop and chill it.

The all-in or single-stage method puts everything into the bowl at once and beats. It is faster, more forgiving of an inattentive operator, and depends on an emulsified shortening rather than on your technique. The foaming or sponge method whisks whole egg or separated egg with sugar to build the foam first, then folds in the flour and any melted fat. It uses no chemical leavening and least fat, and it is the method most damaged by heavy-handed folding, because every unnecessary stroke knocks out the air you just paid for.

Be careful with high-ratio cake, meaning a cake where sugar exceeds flour. It depends on a specially treated cake flour that can carry the extra sugar and liquid. The sugar-to-flour ratio that defines a high-ratio cake, and the flour treatment required, could not be retrieved for this course. Do not attempt a high-ratio formula on ordinary flour on the strength of a recipe from the internet; ask your flour supplier for a technical data sheet stating whether their cake flour is treated for high-ratio work.

Judge doneness with a probe. Cakes and cupcakes finish at 93 to 98 degrees Celsius internal, and a pound cake at 99. That is a far better test than a skewer, which tells you about one point in the crumb and nothing about the rest.

A baker in Nairobi, Kenya, kept losing celebration sponges in the hot months. Her room ran near 30 degrees by mid-morning. She moved cake mixing to 6 a.m., held her margarine in the coolest corner of the store overnight, and started probing every cake instead of timing it. The collapse rate dropped, and the eggs she had been wasting, roughly 20 a week at about 0.12 USD each, or 2.40 USD, paid for the thermometer inside a month.

Biscuits are the most commercially forgiving product a small bakery can make, and the reason is water activity. Fresh pan bread sits at a water activity of 0.93, batter cakes at 0.81, and soda crackers at 0.30. Nothing grows below 0.60; moulds and yeasts can grow down to about 0.60; most bacteria are inhibited below 0.91. So a biscuit is, in microbiological terms, a different class of product from a loaf. For a bakery without refrigeration or reliable daily distribution, biscuits are the line that can be made on Monday and sold on Friday without risk, and that alone can change a business.

Start from the published chocolate chip cookie formula, in baker's percent on flour: pastry flour at 8 to 10 percent protein 100, granulated sugar 40, brown sugar 40, corn syrup 10, shortening 65, water 15, dry eggs 5, baking powder 1, salt 1.5, vanilla 2, chocolate chips 65. Published ranges around it: water absorption in a cookie formula 50 to 54 percent of the flour's capacity, sweetener 17 to 30 percent on a solids basis, fat from 50 percent in a chocolate chip to 80 percent in an oatmeal raisin, and chemical leavening 0.5 to 1 percent of flour weight. A separate teaching classification puts sweet biscuits at fat 25 to 32 percent and sugar 30 to 45 percent, and hard or cracker-type biscuits at fat 0 to 38 percent and sugar 0 to 12 percent.

Notice the flour. Biscuit flour is milled from soft wheat at 8 to 10 percent protein, and its gluten is deliberately the opposite of bread flour's. Measured on an extensograph, bread flour reads resistance 400 and extensibility 190, a ratio of 2.11. Biscuit flour reads resistance 130 and extensibility 160, a ratio of 0.81. In plain terms, bread flour resists being stretched and biscuit flour gives way easily. That is exactly what you want in a biscuit, where a strong elastic dough would shrink back off the cutter and bake tough and misshapen. If your biscuits shrink after cutting, your flour is too strong or you have worked the dough too hard, and the fix is a weaker flour, a shorter mix or a rest before cutting.

Scale a batch. On 5 kg of flour, the published formula gives sugar 2,000 g plus brown sugar 2,000 g, corn syrup 500 g, shortening 3,250 g, water 750 g, dry eggs 250 g, baking powder 50 g, salt 75 g, vanilla 100 g and chocolate chips 3,250 g. Total dough is about 17.2 kg. At 25 g a biscuit that is roughly 690 biscuits before baking loss. If your ingredient cost for that batch is, indicatively, 22 USD and you sell biscuits at 0.05 USD each, the batch grosses 34.50 USD before labour, energy and packaging. Put your own delivered prices in; the arithmetic is the transferable part.

Bake and doneness. The published bake for chocolate chip cookies is 177 degrees Celsius for 13 to 15 minutes to a golden bottom, with an internal doneness temperature of 82 degrees Celsius. Note how much lower that is than bread, and how much shorter the bake. Biscuits are also the product where a small difference in thickness changes everything, so control the cut thickness rather than the time.

Chemical leavening deserves a word. At 0.5 to 1 percent of flour weight there is very little margin for a careless scoop. Weigh it. A biscuit over-leavened spreads thin and tastes soapy; under-leavened it bakes hard and pale.

A bakery in Blantyre, Malawi, selling bread into a market three days a week found its returns line was eating the margin, since unsold bread came back stale. They moved a third of their flour into a hard biscuit at low sugar and low fat, packed in sealed bags. Returns on that line went to almost nothing because the product held for weeks rather than a day, and the biscuit's low water activity, not any preservative, was doing the work.

Pastry is classified by how much fat it carries relative to flour, and once you see the ratios the whole family makes sense. Savoury short crust is soft flour 2 to fat 1, with salt to taste and chilled liquid to bind, so fat is 50 percent of flour. Sweet short crust, pate sucree, is soft flour 3 to fat 2 to icing sugar 1, again with chilled liquid. Rough puff carries fat below 50 percent of flour weight. Flaky pastry carries fat at 50 to 75 percent. Full puff carries fat at 100 percent of flour weight. The laminated dough itself, the detrempe, sits at 50 to 55 percent moisture. A general classification band for pastry as a class puts fat at 80 to 120 percent, water 40 to 60 percent and salt 1.5 to 2.5 percent, which shows how wide the family is.

Use pastry flour, at 8 to 9 percent protein, or a general-purpose flour handled gently. A strong flour makes short pastry tough and makes laminated dough fight you at every roll.

Short pastry works by shortening, meaning the fat coats flour particles and physically interrupts the gluten strands so they cannot form long networks. That is the first of the six published functions of fat. The practical rules follow from the mechanism: keep the fat in visible pieces if you want flakiness, rub in more thoroughly if you want a sandy short texture, use chilled liquid, use the minimum liquid that binds, and stop mixing the moment it comes together. Overworking short pastry develops gluten and produces a crust that is tough and that shrinks in the tin.

Lamination is the harder skill and it is fundamentally a temperature problem, particularly in Africa. You are building alternating layers of dough and fat. If the fat is too cold and hard it cracks and tears through the dough; if it is too warm it melts into the dough and you get one greasy mass instead of layers. The window in which the fat is workable but not melting is the plastic range, the third published function of fat. In a 30-degree bakery that window may be a few minutes long.

Work with the climate rather than against it. Laminate at dawn when the room is coolest. Chill the detrempe and the fat block separately before each fold and after each fold. Work on the coolest surface you have, which is usually stone or steel rather than wood. Use a fat with a wider plastic range, which is what a pastry margarine is formulated for, rather than butter, if you have that choice. And accept fewer folds done well over more folds done in a hurry.

Baking short pastry has a published figure you can use: 177 degrees Celsius for 10 to 15 minutes. Choux paste is published at 190 degrees Celsius for about 35 minutes, until well puffed and golden. Note that the choux ratio itself, the balance of water, butter, flour and eggs, could not be retrieved for this course. The method is well described, cooked before it is baked, but no ratio is available here, so build choux by test batch and record what works rather than trusting an unsourced ratio.

A baker in Dakar, Senegal, supplying a hotel with croissants gave up on lamination for a year because every batch came out flat and greasy. The diagnosis was not skill. She was laminating at eleven in the morning in a room at 34 degrees with no chilling stage between folds. She moved production to 5 a.m., bought a small chest freezer for 180 USD indicatively and used it purely to chill the dough for fifteen minutes between folds, and switched from butter to a pastry margarine for the fat block. The layers came back on the second attempt. The freezer paid for itself in retained hotel orders in under three months.

Finishing is where a bakery adds the most value per minute of work and takes on the most food-safety risk in a single step. Both facts deserve attention.

Start with the risk, because it is the one bakers underestimate. A dry biscuit at a water activity of 0.30 is inert. A cake at 0.81 is reasonably safe. Fresh bread at 0.93 sits well above the mould threshold and inside the bacterial range, and its safety comes from being eaten quickly rather than from any inherent stability. Now put a cream, custard or fresh-fruit filling into a product and you have raised its water activity, added nutrients, and often added a raw or lightly cooked animal product at the same time. The water activity values for buns, scones, pastry and cream or custard fillings could not be retrieved for this course, and that is not a detail to gloss over: filled products are the highest-risk line a small bakery can run, and this course will not guess at their numbers.

What you can rely on are cook temperatures. Custards, meaning creme brulee, flan and pumpkin-pie style fillings, finish at 77 to 79 degrees Celsius. Bread pudding, quiche and meringue pies finish at 71 degrees. Cheesecake finishes at 66 degrees. Those are quality temperatures from a baking source, and they are also food-safety temperatures because the products contain egg. National food codes may set a higher mandatory cook temperature for egg-containing products than these figures, so check with your national food-safety authority before you treat them as sufficient. Egg is both a declared allergen and a raw-animal-product hazard, so handling eggs is a food-safety topic and not only a formulation topic.

Practical rules that follow. Cook custards to a probed temperature, not to a look. Cool fillings fast and separately from the baked shell, in shallow containers rather than a deep bucket, because a deep container cools from the outside for hours while the middle stays warm. Fill as late as possible before sale. If you cannot keep a filled product cold and you cannot sell it within hours, do not make it; make a jam-filled or a dry-finished version instead, which is a business decision as much as a safety one.

Icings behave differently. A high-sugar icing is itself low in water activity, since sugar is hygroscopic and binds water, and that is part of why sugar improves shelf life generally. A buttercream made with a large proportion of icing sugar is far more stable than a fresh dairy cream, and in a bakery without reliable refrigeration that difference should drive your product list.

Now the value side. Finishing is the cheapest margin in the bakery because it adds price faster than it adds cost. Indicative published figures from one commercial guide put gross margin on bread at 40 to 55 percent and on custom cakes at 60 to 75 percent. Those are from one country in one month and are not a benchmark, but the direction is the point. Work your own version: take a plain sponge whose full cost you know, add the cost of icing sugar, fat, colour and a board, add the minutes of decorating labour at your own hourly rate, and compare the total with the price a decorated cake actually fetches in your town.

A worked shape. Suppose a plain 1 kg sponge costs you 2.10 USD to make and sells for 4.00 USD. Icing and decoration add, say, 0.90 USD of materials and 40 minutes of your time. If you value your hour at 1.50 USD, that is 1.00 USD of labour, so the decorated cake costs 4.00 USD and needs to sell above that to be worth doing. If decorated cakes fetch 9.00 USD in your market, the finishing step earned 4.10 USD for 40 minutes, which is a far better rate than another hour of bread.

A bakery in Mombasa, Kenya, dropped fresh-cream fillings entirely after two hot-season complaints, replaced them with a boiled-fruit filling and a sugar-heavy buttercream, and lost almost no sales while removing their single largest safety exposure.

A celebration cake is not a big cake. It is a different business inside your business: made to order, paid for in advance, priced on design rather than on weight, and capable of ruining a week if it goes wrong on a Saturday morning.

The attraction is margin. Indicative published figures put gross margin on bread at 40 to 55 percent and on custom cakes at 60 to 75 percent. Those come from one commercial guide, in one country, in one month, and they are not a benchmark you should quote to a bank. What they do show is the shape: custom work carries better margin than commodity bread because you are selling design and occasion, not grams.

Quote from the formula outward. Take the balanced ratio, flour 100, sugar 100, fat 100, eggs 100, liquid 70 to 100. Suppose a two-tier cake needs 4.5 kg of batter. At a total formula of 485 percent, flour is (4,500 divided by 485) times 100 = 928 g, and sugar, fat and eggs are each 928 g, with liquid at 789 g. Price each of those at your delivered cost. Say indicatively flour 0.90 USD per kg, sugar 1.10, margarine 2.40, eggs 2.60 per kg, milk 0.90 per litre. Ingredients come to roughly 0.84 plus 1.02 plus 2.23 plus 2.41 plus 0.71, which is about 7.21 USD for the batter.

Then add everything the batter does not include. Icing sugar, fondant or buttercream, colour, board, box, ribbon and any topper: call it 6.00 USD indicatively for a two-tier. Energy for the bake, from your own figure in Module 7 Lesson 6. Then labour, which is the line most bakers leave out and the one that decides whether the order was worth taking. Baking, cooling, levelling, filling, crumb-coating, covering and decorating a two-tier cake is rarely under five hours. At 1.50 USD an hour that is 7.50 USD; at 3.00 USD an hour it is 15.00 USD. Add an overhead share and a wastage allowance based on your own measured rejects.

So your two-tier might cost 22 to 30 USD to produce. If your market pays 45 USD you have a real business; if it pays 25 USD you are working for nothing and should either raise the price, simplify the design, or decline. The most common error in African small bakeries is quoting a custom cake from the ingredient cost alone and discovering afterwards that a full day of labour went into it.

Manage the risk with three rules. Take a deposit that at least covers materials, because a cancelled custom cake cannot be resold. Fix a lead time and refuse orders inside it, since a rushed cake in a hot climate is a collapsed cake. And keep a written order sheet with the customer's name and phone number, the date and time of collection, the flavour, the size, the inscription spelled exactly as the customer wrote it, and the allergen declaration you will hand over. That order sheet is also your allergen record, which Module 8 Lesson 2 will make use of.

Capacity is the last decision. Count the hours a custom cake really takes, divide your available decorating hours in a week by that number, and that is your ceiling. Taking more orders than the ceiling does not raise income; it lowers quality and loses bread production at the same time.

A bakery in Accra, Ghana, took five custom orders for one Saturday and delivered four of them late, losing two future customers. They counted the hours afterwards and found each cake took just under six hours of one person's time, against nineteen decorating hours available in their week. Their real ceiling was three. They cut to three orders, raised the price by about 20 percent because they now had a waiting list, and made more money from fewer cakes.

One oven, several products, one day. Batch planning is what turns a list of recipes into a business that finishes on time, and it rests on three orderings: temperature, allergen and risk.

Order by temperature first, because heat is your most expensive input and a wood or gas oven does not change temperature on command. Baking generally runs across an oven band of 150 to 300 degrees Celsius and bake times of 5 to 25 minutes across processes, but that published band deliberately is not broken down by product, so build your own sequence from the specific figures you do have and from your own records. Improved wood-fired ovens bake at around 250 degrees. Bread and rolls sit high in the band. Short crust pastry is published at 177 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes and cookies at 177 degrees for 13 to 15 minutes. Choux is 190 degrees for about 35 minutes.

A wood oven's natural curve is a falling one: hottest just after the fire is drawn, cooling steadily over the following hours. So run down the curve rather than against it. Bread first while the deck is at its hottest, then enriched buns, then cakes, then biscuits and pastry as the oven falls into the 170 to 190 range, then meringues or drying work at the tail. A baker who tries to bake biscuits first and bread last is fighting the oven all day and burning extra wood to do it.

Order by allergen second. The published rule is to process foods without allergens before foods with allergens, to add allergenic ingredients as late in the process as possible, and to run products with identical allergen profiles consecutively. In a one-room bakery, physical separation is usually impossible, so separation in time plus validated cleaning is the only workable route, and that is exactly what this scheduling rule delivers. Practically: run the plain lines before the peanut, sesame or nut lines, not after; group everything containing a given allergen together; and put the cleaning break at the allergen boundary rather than at the end of the day when everyone is tired. Module 8 Lesson 2 covers the detail, including the important fact that the Codex allergen list has eight items and does not include sesame, while many countries now require sesame to be declared.

Order by risk third. Filled and custard products should be made close to the time they are sold, cooled fast in shallow containers, and never left sitting through a long afternoon. If your day has a hot dead period, put the dry lines there and the perishable lines at the ends.

Now write the plan down as a timeline with three columns: clock time, what is in the oven, and what hands are doing while it bakes. The third column is where small bakeries find their capacity. Mixing the next dough, scaling, shaping and washing down all happen during a bake, not after it, and a written plan makes that visible.

Build for interruption, because power and fuel are not reliable. Keep a dough you can hold, since a cooler dough temperature slows fermentation and buys you time; the fermentation optimum is 25 to 28 degrees Celsius and 15 to 20 degrees is described as slow, so a cool corner is a pause button. Know which product on your list is the most tolerant of delay and which is the least, and if the fire is late, reorder rather than push everything back.

A bakery in Harare, Zimbabwe, running one gas deck oven baked cakes at nine, bread at eleven and biscuits at two, reheating and cooling the oven twice a day. Rearranging to bread, then buns, then cakes, then biscuits down a single falling curve cut their gas consumption noticeably, and because the plan was written on the wall the second baker could run the day without the owner present. The written plan, not the rearrangement alone, was what made it stick.